overease

Last night I (re)watched "Cape Fear" (the 1962 version) on Turner Classic Movies. Maybe it's just that I don't live in 1962, but for the first twenty minutes or so, even though I knew Robert Mitchum was the villain, I was on his side as his civil liberties were repeatedly and blatantly violated. I wish the movie would go a little further in letting us think maybe Gregory Peck's fears are unreasonable before revealing without a doubt that Mitchum is a psychopath. But anyway, my real beef is with the TCM commentator, who afterwards mentioned the "overreaction" of one reviewer at the time who called the film [and here's the bid for google rankings: Woo-hoo! I know I'll get some hits now] pornographic. "What kind of pornography was HE watching?" Well, maybe he was watching 1950s pornography, considerably tamer than the stuff out now. Or maybe he was just focused on the fact that in the culminating moments, a man who is known to have raped and done unspeakable sexual things to multiple women rips off the female protagonist's clothes while telling her he is going to rape her twelve-year-old daughter. Maybe that's just unremarkable these days. Maybe it's the fact that so much had to be left unsaid that makes this hard to match for insidious creepiness.

Oh, and speaking of not living in 1962. Gotta love that you can walk up to a check-in counter at an airport and ask whether a certain person was on a flight that just left, and the staffer will not only tell you that, but will volunteer his return flight info, too.

And then there's the actual scandal, which happens to be on another high-volume web topic: printer ink. I put a new cartridge in my new printer a week ago and I'm already out of ink. I know I've been doing a lot of printing, but not that much: I haven't come close to using up a ream of paper. This is ridiculous! It's enough to make you boycott all printer companies!

Somehow I don't think I'm gonna get a whole lotta traction on that one.